1. Field of the Invention
The subject invention relates to automated manufacturing equipment in the style of an assembly line. More particularly, the invention concerns a filling preparation station that produces defined lengths of meat or other filling materials and precisely places the filling material upon tortillas for the manufacture of taquitos, enchiladas, burritos, and other rolled, folded, or wrapped tortilla foods.
2. Description of the Related Art
For many years, the food manufacturing industry has been a productive source of technological innovation. Without the use of machines, the manufacturing of food products can require an enormous amount of repetitive labor. Although human workers are frequently needed to supervise, correct, and even perform many steps in the food manufacturing process, today's factories are using machines in greater numbers to complete tasks that are amenable to automated performance.
The Mexican food industry is no exception to the current trend. One example of automation in the Mexican food industry appears in the assembly of filled tortilla products such as "taquitos" (also known as "rolled tacos"), burritos, enchiladas, quesadillas, and the like. Each of these products comprises a tortilla that is wrapped, rolled, or folded about an internal "filling" material, such as meat, cheese, beans, and/or rice, etc. One early technical innovation in creating filled tortilla products has been the use of an extrusion machine to create filling segments of desired sizes. This extrusion machine places its filling segments upon a conveyor belt. Human hands remove filling segments from this conveyor belt, center the filling segments on tortillas arriving on a different conveyor belt, and roll, fold, or wrap the tortillas about their filling segments.
As an improvement to this product line, another known technique changed the process of creating and depositing the filing material. This technique employs a pulsed, volumetric extruder to create the filling segments. The extruder's nozzle is positioned to generate filling segments directly onto the tortillas arriving on their conveyor belt. After a filling portion is deposited on a tortilla, a human worker removes the filling and tortilla onto a platform, repositions the filling, rolls, folds, or wraps the tortilla about the filling segment, and places the completed product on an output conveyor belt leading to a fryer, freezer, or other processing device. This arrangement provided some benefit because it uses the extruder to initially place filling material onto tortillas, saving the cost of having human laborers perform this task.
Nonetheless, there are still a number of remaining challenges to those people interested in a more automated assembly line. One such challenge is in reducing variance in the sizes of the filling segments, since filling segments must include a minimum volume according to eventual package labeling. Therefore, in order to guarantee this minimum volume, the extruder must be adjusted to generate slightly larger filling pieces to account for the possibility of errant, small pieces. Whenever the size of a filing piece exceeds the designated minimum volume, however, the excess product incurs an excess cost. Accordingly, a significant challenge exists in the area of automatically controlling product size.
There are still other challenges in automated manufacturing of Mexican food. Even though the conventional approach initially places the filling material on the tortillas, workers are still needed to reposition the filling material because automated placement is not always accurate. Inaccurate placement is undesirable for various reasons, such as the creation of an unattractive and unappetizing product. In addition, if automated machinery places the filling material so poorly that it protrudes from the tortilla, the filling material could contaminate downstream processing equipment if this protruding filling material breaks off. Moreover, if poorly placed filling material misses its intended tortilla to create an unfilled tortilla, the tortilla can excessively absorb fryer oil, depleting the oil earlier than otherwise necessary. As a result, human labor has been necessary to ensure accurate filling placement. This additional labor adds more cost to the assembly process, ultimately narrowing the profit margin for the ultimate product.
Consequently, known manufacturing processes for filled tortilla products are not completely adequate for some applications due to certain unsolved problems.